There are some things that were nice to have as Free Software and some things that totally suck. Don’t get this wrong. I like Linux and Free Software in general, and prefer it to any other closed source piece of Software, because of this openness and because it is more written for geeks than for dumb noobs. Like this other OS which gets more and more tedious to work with. Which gets worse with every version. Now you have to literally dive through piles of much to verbose and mostly nonsensical description „essays“ and error „novels“ only to find out that this OS won’t tell you at all whats going on. Like „A problem has ocurred. Ask your Administrator.“ %$§$&% I AM the Administrator!!!! „…want to… ask a friend?“ yeah.

Video conferencing

Needed: Skype equivalent.

Available Solutions: ekiga, empathy, kopete, pidgin, kphone, linphone.
Problems with existing solutions: none has the ability to encrypt video and/or audio which I consider essential for a modern communication tool. Skype’s encryption is at least good enough to frustrate the common network admin, which is way better than any open source has to offer out of the boy until now.
And no, additional vpn tunnels or zrtp proxies don’t cut it. They are a PITA to setup and maintain. Zfone has unclear licensing terms which seems to be the reason it isn’t packaged by distributions.
Ekiga seems to be the most usable at this time. Searching google for „ZRTP ekiga“ gives many results, it seams they attempt to include it since 2006, but it isn’t here until now. Additionally ekiga has a clumsy interface and is very hard to setup with things like sip-over-vpn or serverless sip. I guess it’s the typical gnome/windows thing: do some 50% standard things automatically and don’t care about the rest. They seem to be busy plumbing an instant messenger onto sip at the moment.
Empathy and the telepathy framework seems to be most promising now in my opinion because of their modular architecture.
I want: theora(x264) + speex,celt, builtin encryption, easy NAT traversal, easy installation. Everything is here: zrtp/srtp or dtls, stun, ICE, all codecs have open implementations, there are many open media frameworks.
Jingle seemed promising, doing away with the SIP cruft, I have seen many attempts to implement it into OS messaging clients, but none was usable. Don’t know why.

All in all it seems most of the developers are not at all interested in adding encryption to their program, some even seem to oppose it. Hey, lets create a new Conspiracy Theory (TM): „They“ prevent the development of free and open voice/video encryption software.

Video editing

Cinelerra was an utter failure regarding stability and usability. The Lumiera project by some people out of the cinelerra community sounds great, but will apparently not be usable in the foreseeable future. Pitivi and openshot are severely lacking in features until now but may have their userbase. Kdenlive has made large advancements and is the most usable at the time of writing, but it’s lacking basic features like keyframes for effects and stable effects. (ever tried to anonymize e.g. a video of a political demonstration?) Also there are only very few video format presets, and you cannot easily define custom ones.
Let’s hope Lightworks goes the Blender way and not the Xara way… The feature list looks really nice.

64bit runtimes for java, flash

Oh please Adobe and Sun/Oracle: Would you please finally make 64 bit versions of your runtimes that simply work as „well“ as in 32 bit?
As flash is mostly used for videos and advertisements, we can hope it will be replaced by html5 in near future, whereas the lack of a 64 bit java vm with a non-memory-eating client mode is really bitter. At least there is now an applet plugin. Now that memory and cpu time are so abundant that we write whole applications in Javascript, Java would have been a great technology for client apps and web, but of course Sun decided to totally botch it with their former stupid licensing policy and their neglegience for everything else than „Enterprise Business yaddahh“.

Who in his right mind wants do cross-develop using Windows if he could use Linux, the developer’s platform?

Video recording/synchronization

Have you ever tried to record video directly from webcam to disk? Perhaps you even have an mjpeg camera and hoped it could simply dump frames beneath some audio? I tried ffmpeg, mencoder, vlc, gstreamer, transcode. I was lucky when they handled v4l2 at all, then some of them didn’t even have alsa input drivers (alsa is around since 1998…)

Main problem here is:
There a two completely separeate streams: Video as a somewhat irregular timed sequence of jpegs and audio as a normal alsa stream from an usb-audio-driver. One would expect that it should be possible to simply write both streams nicely timestamped into a container format and process (cut, recode, whatever) the whole thing afterwards in non-realtime. Nope.Vvlc doesn’t work with raw mjpeg, and doesn’t have alsa input. Mencoder does have raw mjpeg, but it segfaults immediately. And it can only write avi files which need a regular framerate.
With ffmpeg A/V-sync was a total mess, although it otherwise worked.
Gstreamers gst-launch is a great tool, but no matter how many buffers and timestamper plugins one inserts audio is not in sync with avi. Mkv works fine, but no other program can open mjpeg-in-mkv or at least convert it to a different mjpeg container format.

Video transcoding

What I want: Start with a DVB recording as one or more TS files and an edit decision list consisting of cut-in/cut-out times.Goal: Get a properly a/v-synced mp4/mkv file in one single step:

Proper video drivers

Nvidia’s binary blob works as long as you have a new graphics card and as long you are lucky. I have to use an old „legacy“ version now with my old graphics card. At the moment it seems I have some settings wrong. It’s sluggish as hell. Switched to nouveau today. I can live without 3D and power management on this computer as I use it mostly for surfing and as a server. I’m confident nouveau will improve.
Ati’s binary driver was really bad some time ago, but has improved. You still can’t make screencasts with a decent framerate, the computer hangs completely when you start a second x-server, and so on. I’ll change to the open source driver the day they implement power management.
Yeah @Intel: H.264 acceleration in Q3

I already had a lot of „Frustblogging“-s, this time I will try to post one in english, creating a neologism „frustrational“ (at least I couldnt find that word anywhere in a dictionary, so I assume it is free to be given a meaning).

Firstly, since about a month my mobile phone is behaving strange, and since I have a lot of phone calls to do in the next days, I need a reliable one. In April, my provider would pay me a new one anyway, but of course it had to get broken now, one and a half month before this. I also had an older mobilephone which worked well when I stopped using it, but it doesnt accept SIM Cards anymore, seems like it cannot read them or something. The cheapest mobile phone without simlock was 30€ … which is a lot of money for a phone you mainly buy for six weeks. But no choice – I had to buy it. There is no cheaper one without simlock, and the next cheapest was 80€. This 30€-Phone was made in China – so thank you China for producing cheap stuff!

Well, I am late with my project thesis, so I wanted to hurry up today. On the other hand, I wanted to drive home. So – well, took my MacBook and went home. At home, I have a large screen, where I usually put my laptops on when I am there – but this time I have forgotten the adapter one needs to connect the new MacBooks to external screens – thank Apple for not adding a simple DVI-socket to the macbooks, requiring them to have an external adapter!

At least I didnt forget the power supply.

So well, then since my thinclient refuted to start its X-Server for some reason (and now refutes to boot), I am bound to this little screen. Well, then, lets think of this problem later and connect to the internet. So I was – as usual – starting my 100€ OpenWRT-Compatible Router … booting … connecting … getting a correct dhcp-answer and everything … but not being able to connect to the internet. The stupid Windows Network Diagnose wasnt helpfull at all. And … hm … the router password is on the harddisk I have also left at my workplace. Urks!

So I digged out my old 25€ Digitus Router (which has no Wireless LAN – but who cares), and well, it worked. Since I dont have the router password at the moment (maybe its on another HardDisk I have here, but its … encrypted via LUKS, which makes it harder to access under Windows, but maybe I find time to do so), I will for now just continue with my old Router. Now having an internet connection I was thinking about setting up a new Syslinux-Live-System for my thinclient, so maybe I can use the large screen. This will now take about one and a half hour, since … well … Germany does its best to become an LDC, and thus there must not be fast internet in the countryside.

Just think about it: In Munich, Internet which is eightteen times faster than here is cheaper (luckily, we have DSL Connections here – in some other countrysides, they still use Dial Up connections). And through UMTS and HSDPA you will get mobile internet which is seven times faster than the cable internet here is – cheaper! Thank our politicians for the privatisation of telecommunications!

That being said, I am curious about rdesktop – I never used it so far. Maybe I get it work on my ThinClient.

Have you ever searched for „Elephant“ in Google? Well, if you do so, you will maybe find a lot of films and articles about the well-known animal we call „Elephant“. So if somebody told you about a Software called „Elephant“, well, you would have to add a lot of additional descriptions or you would have no real chance to find it. Besides maybe other projects, there is this Persistence-Library for Common Lisp called „Elephant“. Well, I heard of this library the first time when reading the Reddit-Entry „Comparison of CL-SQL and Elephant„, and actually, this title pretty much shows the problem with softare namings – it simply sounds stupid!

Now search for „Python“. Yeah, the Python programming language is more common than the animal – you will find a lot of stuff for both.

I can remember a lecturer telling about a project named „ant“. Of course, ants are insects. And ANT is a compiling infrastructure for Java. He meant an example of an Agent-Oriented Programming-Language. Calling it Ant may fit to agent-oriented programming, but since this is so generic, in almost every website about agent-oriented programming, you will find the word „ant“ mentioned – even without any reference to this system.

Seems like generally animal names (Elephant, Python, Ant) are liked by people writing software. But of course, its not limited to animal names. Generally, ambiguous names seem to magically attract people.

At least Pidgin – which is named after pigeons – names itself after the language. Before that, it was called GAIM. And the library behind it was called libgaim. Ok, they had to change the name for licensing resons. But did they really have to call it pidgin? A name which has almost nothing to do with IM? But ok – they called it pidgin. Lets accept that. So the backend-library could have been called libpidgin, and everybody would be happy. But no, the backend is called libpurple now – such that it is nearly impossible to find that name if you dont know it already. Great!

Calling an operating system Windows already made some people forget what „Windows“ are.

Does anybody recognize, what an „Apache“ originally was? Well, at least the inventors of the Cherokee Webserver obviously did …

In the Lisp-World, words sounding like „Closure“ seem to be liked. There is the Closure Webbrowser, the Common Lisp compiler named Clozure, and – of course – Clojure. Why not starting more projects like this.

How about Closhure? Or Clochure? Or Closchure? Or Cloyure? Or Cloşure? Or Cloжure? Or Clošure? Or Cloʃure? Or Cloש‎ure? Or Cloシュre?

Nevermind. Since I was very nerved by the situation of fastcgi and clos-streams under common lisp about two years ago, I began to write a library for fastcgi which should not depend on any implementation-specific features (except for a simple socket-binding) and had the problem that this is complicated without having clos-streams, so I began to try to write something portable for this (well, today I think differently, but in those days I was still a beginner – and doing experiments is a good thing). I called it „Fastcgi Usable in Common-lisp Kits Yachting through the Oceans of Unportability“ (which is – of course – mostly shortened to an acronym), and the stream-library was called „Commonlisp User Mode Binary ALLpurpose Streams“ (which is also shortend to an acronym). A pity that I havent released it – maybe reddit would have a title „comparison between clos-streams and …“ now.